Reflection on Research Project

Reflection on the Research Project

The initial problem I ran into was locating references relevant to what I wanted to write about. When I had finally found the required amount using Consortium Library tools, I read over part two directions once more only to find that 10 of the 15 sources had to be dated 2007 or 2008. This was disheartening, because most of mine were much older than this. I had taken a short workshop freshman year on using the online databases the UA system offers like EbscoHost, but it had been so long that I couldn’t figure out how to do a refined search for current publications. To solve this issue, I trudged over to the library and sat down with the gentleman at the research desk. There, he showed me the ins and outs of the library website and I was able to track down several much-needed sources that met the date guidelines and contained support for my thesis. The hardest step for me was part two, because of the hurdles I ran into that I just explained. For some reason I found it hard to explain how each source would benefit my paper without having started writing the paper yet. Another difficulty for me was obviously the MLA formatting of citations- and I know this was due to never having the Writer’s Reference with me while working on the bibliography. I know now that I don’t have a Writer’s Reference built into my brain and I should probably follow directions a little better. I wouldn’t say the paper was an uphill struggle. At first, I was really overwhelmed with all the journal articles I had in front of me and had no idea where to start. My aha! moment occurred when I figured out a system for how to read through each article and be able to pull out the most important points to use for my argument. I read through each one before even starting to write the paper and organized them into categories according to which part or parts of my thesis they corresponded to. This made the paper a lot easier to write. I feel like one strength of the paper is that the components of my thesis complemented each other which facilitated a well-rounded paper. The ideas of direct and indirect pollution causing harm to these animals go hand and hand with each other, and it made it easier for me to lead into different topics. In the beginning, I was thinking to do a paper about sea turtles but do more of a hardcore biochemical analysis of the chemicals and how they harm the animal. Thinking this over, I decided that the paper wouldn’t really be an English paper, it would be a paper I’d write for a science class. And that just didn’t seem like very much fun. I wanted to be able to reach a more broad audience, and relay the “big picture” of this problem as best I could. If I had done the biochemical analysis one, I would have bored anyone who read it, including myself. There’s several things that I could do if I had more time. While searching for references, I found many that pertained to nesting areas of sea turtles being demolished and poisoned due to pollution. I could add another section about this topic, and link it to the maternal-egg transfer idea I wrote about. I could talk about how in addition to receiving pollutants from the mother, eggs undergo harsh environments in nesting areas that are polluted as well. Overall, I could further improve how the essay flows. I could find ways to link the different research publications a little better, and expand more on the big picture view of sea turtle endangerment. Although I feel like I’ve improved, I still need to keep working on improving mechanical and grammatical usage in addition to paragraph transitions and fully expanding my ideas.